Thursday, January 29, 2009

And the best that "Big John," the junior Senator from Texas, can come up with is a campaign ad that makes him sound like a badly-monickered gay porn star.Keep voting down the stimulus, you windbag. Keep asking "where's the money coming from?" Keep pandering to the worst, most paranoid, ignorant, and fearful aspects of your shrinking constituency.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

They're having to do this because big chunks of their annual giving as well as their permanent endowment came from Jewish alumni, who were among the demographic groups most directly targeted by Bernard Madoff's psychotic Ponzi scheme. For non-profits and universities, it's a double-whammy: their usual donors (the $3 million/year couples, that sort of thing) are scaling way back, and the university's own investments with Madoff took a horrific hit. Madoff apparently intentionally went after wealthy, educated, and/or progressive Jewish folks and institutions.

There is some kind of karmic payback operating here: Brandeis--and, far more tragically, her students--are being burned because of precisely the same kind of identity politics that has led the university to give academic legitimacy to the most contemptible Zionist apologists for Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Palestine. Are you listening, Alan Dershowitz?!?

Saturday, January 24, 2009

– FRANKS (R-AZ_: “President Bush often had to walk like a knowing lion — like a knowing lion, Mr. Speaker, through the chattering of hyenas. … [I]f those critics do not devour themselves in the meantime, Mr. Speaker, they may face the bared teeth of an enemy that will make us all wish the lion still walked among us.”

If there's anything that the recent election season has (once again) confirmed for us, it's that, in fact, most politicians are people deeply, profoundly, (typically) cripplingly in need of approval. Either (a) they got into politics in the first place or in part because their personalities were so needy that only an entire crowd or constituency signaling blatant approval at the ballot box would make them feel OK about themselves; or (b) having got into politics--typically for the only other common reason: namely greed--they realize that the only/best hope for staying within that ego-intoxicating bubble is to manifest a constant, avid, pathetic need for approval.

And this innate or learned neediness in turn makes them, typically, deeply timid if not outright cowardly people. How many chest-thumping war-mongering torture-promoting politicians can we enumerate who, when the option of actually putting their bodies at risk for the sake of the nation, found deferments or "other priorities" or cushy National Guard gigs? Can we say, pretty much all of them? They are deeply cowardly people--and their compensatory war-and-torture-porn fantasies of macho dominance, which reach their most blatant homoerotic nadir with the contemptible 24, reveal that cowardice. Viz the FOX news assholes who claim "Obama and his wife just exchanged a terrorist fist-bump!" or "what if there's a ticking-bomb scenario and the only way we can 'get the intel' (they fucking love slinging around military jargon, mostly because their experience is so distant from the combat zone) is by torturing?!?" or "why, Obama was so mean to Preznit Bush in the inauguration speech! He was so mean!" or "How do I know he's not a seekrit Musl'm?!?" or "I hope the Preznit fails!" These are frightened, cowardly, bullying people, and like most bullies, they fold like tissue paper when they are confronted with someone in public life who is not.

This is why, when they encounter a politician like James Webb, or Max Cleland, or even corrupt old Marine jarhead Jack Murtha, who actually is a combat vet--who knows what real (as opposed to fearful pornographic fantasy) bodily peril actually is--all those gutless posturing assholes squeal like pigs. They are needly, fearful, cowardly, bullying phonies.

It's also why, when we see a politician who is not afraid, who seems to have a reasonably robust and centered ego, who is morally tough, and who, most crucially, is willing (as one of Dharmonia's Tibetan teachers said) to "dare to be disliked," it hits us like a bolt from the blue, and we say "Oh, yeah, that's right! That's what we remember some of our greatest leaders to have been like!"

George Washington, John Adams, Frances Marion, Thomas Paine, Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, Baron von Steuben, Henry Knox, Benjamin Franklin, the barefooted ragged volunteers freezing at Valley Forge at the darkest moment of our battle for Independence...these were not frightened people. They had the courage of their convictions, and the confidence and unwavering moral center that arose from knowing why they were fighting. They practiced "Freedom from Fear."

Like this guy:

WASHINGTON -- President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

"You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," he told top GOP leaders.

President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning - but he also left no doubt about who's in charge of these negotiations. "I won," Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

And below, the President articulates his combat philosophy. He describes himself as a "counter-puncher," a combat strategy with which I empathize.

Best line? The last one, where he's talking about, first, trying to see an adversary's point of view. Then he adds, "And if I perceive that they're trying to take advantage of that, the I will crush them."

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Excerpt from a reply to a friend regarding the absurd lies being attempted by FOX News; Chris Wallace saying that, because the jackass Roberts bobbled the oath, "Obama's presidency might be contested in the courts"--thereby revealing Wallace's utter ignorance of how the Constitutional process actually works:

They're the same assholes you brought you the hysterical "it was a terrorist fist-bump!" story. Their basic editorial stance is "pants-wetting paranoid psychotic" because they think it sells best to the terrified elderly white folks who are their core audience.We got us a new Prezdent. Fox can fuck off into the wilderness.

Sitting in a friend's office, roomful of musicians, watching the 44th President give the speech and provide the first faint, meagre, glimmer of possibility that just maybe, just maybe we'll begin to shift back toward recovering our basic humanity, the phone rings. Friend looks at the phone-bank, says

The fascist wingnuts who for eight years have demonized anybody who didn't get on board with their torturing, crusading, lying, stealing, murdering, propagandizing, syntax-mangling, sneering, oligarchic, Evil.

That's who really hated us for our freedoms. And for eight years did everything they could to try to take them away. And mostly succeeded.

Been a long time comin'. 'Bout fuckin' time. 147 years after the Emancipation proclamation, we have the tiniest window of opportunity to begin bringing the reality of this nation a few millimeters closer to the possibilities of this country.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

You know how the Pentagon keeps claiming that people who've been released from Gitmo have returned to terrorism (or just become terrorists)? Well, there's no reason to believe it. None of their stories pan out, they have strange definitions of "terrorism" ("They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival."), and they say themselves that they don't track such things.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Sent, at his invitation, to Karl Rove's Twitter account so he can share "farewell messages" with Chimpy:

George W. Bush has been the most incompetent, negligent, disassociated, sociopathic, crime-enabling Chief Executive in the history of this nation, and you, Mr Rove, have been one of the prime architects of his Administration's across-the-board criminality. He is a monster and you are scum. Good luck with Attorney General Holder's indictments.

Most sincerely,

Dr Coyote

Feel free to follow suit, at gwbfarewell@gmail.com. Let's let the Prezni know what we really think of him.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

He took the nation to a war of choice under false pretenses -- and left troops in harm's way on two fields of battle. He embraced torture as an interrogation tactic and turned the world's champion of human dignity into an outlaw nation and international pariah. He watched with detachment as a major American city went under water. He was ostensibly at the helm as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression took hold. He went from being the most popular to the most disappointing president, having squandered a unique opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after Sept. 11. He set a new precedent for avoiding the general public in favor of screened audiences and seemed to occupy an alternate reality. He took his own political party from seeming permanent majority status to where it is today. And he deliberately politicized the federal government, circumvented the traditional policymaking process, ignored expert advice and suppressed dissent, leaving behind a broken government.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Ann Coulter's appearance on the "Today" show has been canceled. NBC had come under fire for booking Coulter, who had been scheduled to promote her new book, Guilty, on the "Today" show Thursday morning. But on her website, Coulter announced that the appearance had been "cancelled" [sic].

Yeah, bitch--it's a different age now, isn't it? Your cheap-ass little-black-dress cheerleader-of-hate shtick ain't playing so good in the New Age, is it?

About Me

In the wake of tenure, now able to de-cloak and stand by abusive and acerbic opinions contained herein. Disclaimer: these are personal opinions expressed in public space--which the members of a free democracy are (once again) permitted to do. If you disagree, complain to me, not my employers.
Associate professor and Chair of musicology and Director of the Vernacular Music Center.